I am not prepared for coronavirus, nor are you, I bet. I am making no judgement about your on-hand stock of sanitizer and cleaning wipes. This is not about what’s in the pantry, but rather about what we’re going to have in life and what we’ll be doing going forward.

We usually go to the movies to escape reality for a couple of hours. It’s a rare movie anymore that has me thinking on its message long after the lights have come up and everyone has moved on to worry over the latest coronavirus update.

In the grand scheme of things, Grandma Domenick was probably hazardous to our health as children. She smoked harder than the steamer that brought her to America as a 4-year-old girl from Naples. Her colorful penchant for cursing in Italian earned nickels on her ocean passage as entertainment…

We know our children from that very first moment. Even before they are the size of a pea, we are talking to them, singing to them, cooing for them, performing for them. Who hasn’t read Dr. Seuss to a belly button?

The holiday season has this way of pulling my gaze to the rear-view mirror, where objects can be closer than they appear. Over the last few years in this space, I’ve used the month of December to offer a few reflections on seasons past and present.

The temperature may now reliably be less than 90 degrees, the longleaf pines are shedding their brown needles in fall’s breeze, and college football’s marquee matches are piling up. For me, that signals that election season is in full throttle.

College football kicked off in full force Saturday, and continues tonight and Monday night. But if you’re like me and the parent of a kid playing football, you know the past month has been replete with practices, jamborees and lots of sweaty laundry.

Over the past couple of weeks, I and Pilot Publisher David Woronoff have fielded questions from folks about the paper’s Letters to the Editor section of the Opinion page. We’ve been asked — in ways ranging from polite to incredulous — what our standards are for publishing letters we receive.

On Father’s Day last year, I wrote about how it’s only later in life — if at all — that we realize certain aspects about our dads as our relationship matures. I’ve come to find that even then, there are some stories that don’t get revealed until they’re gone.

The discussion around the Moore County Schools redistricting project has not been among our finer moments of upbuilding in the Sandhills. Honest differences and disagreements are to be expected, but particularly stunning has been the way some parents have virtually demonized the people, the …

You can get your weather forecast pretty much anywhere these days. The household talking speaker will brief you as easily as dozens of weather apps available for your smartphone. To think there was a time the media industry thought Frank Batten Sr. was crazy for starting a 24-7 weather chann…

This column should be shorter than normal in accordance with its subject: shorts. Were I in the textile manufacturing business, the last thing I’d want to be turning out today would be a garment that extends beyond the lower thigh.

Poor Daisy Hawkins. She was the original loner picking up rice in a church where a wedding had been. “Eleanor Rigby” came around later. “I was looking for a name that sounded natural,” Paul McCartney said in an interview about writing the classic Beatles song. “‘Eleanor Rigby’ sounded natural.”

The email this past week had the subject line “So Thin!” Has someone seen me working out at the gym? Was it one of those inbox come-ons that you always get in the new year to “start a new you”? Fat chance.

Newspaper work can be quite humbling. Hollywood, as only Hollywood can do, emphasizes the rare moments of glory, of scruffy reporters in rolled-up sleeves saving democracy. Saving democracy is not an everyday thing in this business, just as surgeons are far more likely to spend their days re…